Am I Missing Something?
“History is a race between education and catastrophe.” ~ H.G. Wells
Guess who’s winning?
Here is the gist of what I have been reading this morning:
- Several states are again “watering down standards” for a high school diploma
- grade deflation is alive and well in college
- Obama sets a state-of-the-union goal of having the highest college graduation rate in the world by 2020
Yes, U.S. colleges and universities are still ranked vastly higher than their world counterparts (China has none in the top 100); but the evidence of a system in decline can be found with just a little google excavation. In math, reading and science skills, we are woefully inadequate, beginning at the primary school level… and becoming more so. Did you know that the United States is the ONLY country…
where 25-34 year olds are not better educated than 55-64 year olds? And in the all-important are of scientific education… that is us, just beating out the Slovak Republic on the OECD chart.
We have been throwing money at education for years, as we continue to do; but at the same time we keep lowering standards for high school and college graduation…apparently to no avail. It kind of reminds me of kid sports, where there now seem to be medals and statuettes for everyone, regardless of who wins, or the level of performance. It is obvious to me, though apparently not to our state and federal governments, that our diplomas and degrees are well on the way to such devaluation. We need to have strict, immutable standards for achievement, and any new money should reflect those standards. A college degree should be a measure of significant accomplishment.
Obama is correct when he says “The nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow.” But having the “highest graduation rate in the world” means nothing if our college degrees soon become educationally equivalent to the high school degrees in other countries. And, from my reading, half the students in a four year college probably should not be there in the first place. A 50% graduation rate seems to bear this out, as does remedial learning just to enter college. Laughable? Pitiful? You decide. But is it improbable that our college degrees might someday be equivalent to high school degrees in Singapore or even Canada ? No. If our standards and comparisons with other countries continue to decline, we will move from such rankings with the Slovak Republic to ranking with Turkey and Kazakhstan, unless they too surpass us.
College degree? I’m no longer impressed.
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